The Boy Who's Going to Kill Facebook Is Playing Videogames in His Mom's Basement As I Write This

Eric Jackson
, ContributorI write about technology and media.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Continued from page 1

What new app will he create to kill Facebook? Who knows? However, one thing’s clear. Facebook didn’t become Facebook by being a better Yahoo! And the company that kills Facebook won’t out-Facebook Facebook. They will come up with something completely different that users won’t know they needed until they experience it. It will be a fascinating bauble that the crowd can’t take their eyes off.

And its popularity will happen much faster than anyone expects – including Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter will explode about this new new thing. “Have you seen?” “Have you heard?” “This thing’s exploding!” “Look at this Google Trends chart.”

Adoption will explode.

I’m sure that the Facebook killer will be 100% mobile. They won’t have a website, except to refer you back to the mobile app – one version customized for a phone and the other customized to a tablet. It will launch exclusively in iOS. It will live in a mobile experience and be inherently social as it will allow you to connect with and be informed by your friends, family, and world around you.

But I doubt anyone will – at first – be able to spot “the next Facebook” because it won’t have anything to do with what Facebook does. It will be orthogonal to Facebook and may even partner with Facebook at first – or at least build up their user base through Facebook Connect. No one will write about how it’s a potential Facebook killer for at least 18 months after its founding.

However, as the user base continues to ramp up impressively, the first hint that there’s a real shift in the balance of power will come when this app suddenly adds some new product feature to its core feature. Then, it will dawn on all how this hot app has the potential to be the “king of mobile” and therefore dethroning the “king of social” (or at least the “king of social 1.0”).

Instagram was never obviously a direct threat to Facebook, right? Yet, it was an ideally suiting app for mobile devices. User growth was exploded. All the cool kids used it.

Despite all the folks who complained about Instagram having no revenues, 13 employees and selling for $1 billion, the fact is that they were on exactly the arc I’m describing. Kevin Systrom and his investors could have made the biggest mistake of their careers by selling out to Zuckerberg instead of doubling down and taking him on. Systrom will learn as he ages that life doesn’t always give you chances to reshape the world every 5 years.

But what if Instagram hadn’t sold? Might they have just been a fad that could have burned out – like some say will happen to OMGPOP and Pinterest? We’ll never know, but Instagram definitely seemed to have significant momentum behind it with a huge user base to convert to other purposes down the road.

So, does this mean that Facebook will get all the benefits that Instagram would have had because it now owns it? Unfortunately not. The history of acquisitions says Instagram will no longer grow as quickly as part of Facebook as it would have on its own.

Maybe Zuckerberg thinks he can stay the “kind of social” by buying every potential “king of mobile” that comes along. He’ll certainly have the market cap to make that theoretically possible after his IPO.